Category Archives: What to Watch Wednesday

Strange nightmares, amnesia, lesbian love scenes, murder, and Hollywood politics. Those are just a few of the things jammed into a film that will leave you questioning reality. David Lynch, whose mind seems to naturally synthesize hallucinogens, outdoes himself with Mulholland Drive, in which an up-and-coming actress stumbles upon a woman who has just lost her memory in a car accident.

Interspersed into the main plot are at least a half-dozen mini stories that often seem entirely unrelated, but which slowly weave together to give you a semblance of understanding. Each plot is so strange that you can’t help but be intrigued. It’s the Lady Gaga Effect. You just can’t peel your eyes off her music videos because your brain is too busy attempting to piece together the images on screen into something it can rationally understand.

If you’re a fan of the open-ended, mind-bending, psychological neo-noir thriller genre (a very general category), you’ll suddenly find yourself with a new favorite. Nowadays the movies we talk about for hours having a couple of possibilities. Take Inception. Was it a dream or wasn’t it? Sure, there are fine points to debate, but in the end there’s only a few real options.

Not so for Mulholland Drive. Once the credits roll, you’ll be left in a stunned stupor, and once your brain unmushifies itself, you’ll spend the next couple weeks debating every single scene and sometimes wondering just what the hell it was even doing in the movie. I, for one, couldn’t stop talking about it and ended up calling my parents and all their family friends to get their take.

How can you not want to watch the movie where THIS happens?

It’s one of the trippiest, craziest, films around, so check it out! Oh, and make sure you watch this movie with a couple people so you can talk about it after—that’s half the fun!

It’s that day of the week! No, not shower day (some weeks I skip that one). It’s

What to Watch Wednesday

And this week you should watch Moon, in which Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey steal the show from…themselves? One of the coolest things about Moon is that there’s only one actor on screen for the entire 97 minutes. Sam Rockwell plays a lonely man on the moon stuck doing a 3-year stint maintaining a nearly automated mining facility. His only companion is an understated robot voiced by Kevin Spacey.

Being alone on the moon is a dull existence, that is, until you stumble upon the injured body of…well, you should just go watch the movie. Everything is not as it seems, and Sam Rockwell must forget the life he thought he knew in order to accomplish something important with what time he has left.

And if it stars Sam Rockwell, you know it’s going to be good. He might be the actor with the best quality to fame ratio. He’s Guy Fleegman in Galaxy Quest: “I’m not even supposed to be here. I’m just ‘Crewman Number Six.’ I’m expendable. I’m the guy in the episode who dies to prove how serious the situation is. I’ve gotta get outta here!” And he’s Justin Hammer, that slick, evil guy from Iron Man 2 who almost outshined Robert Downey Jr. in their scenes together.

If you want a low-budget, high-concept film that will keep you interested and make you think, all the while forcing you to question your concepts of morality, then this is the movie for you. On the other hand, it’s mostly slow and dialogue driven, so if you’re in the mood for something more fast-paced with action, plot twists, and, well, character interaction, then steer clear of this one.

Because IT compels you to. Giant, overpowering, brains are always compelling people to do this and that, aren’t they? I feel like just once I’d love for an oversized, all-powerful brain to turn away from evil and devote some of its mental resources to solving world hunger or eliminating crime or understanding women or something (if any of you omnipotent brains figure that last one out, let me know).

Anyway, I’m sure tons of you have read A Wrinkle in Time, that fantastic kids book filled with magical creatures, space travel, and learning that the most powerful thing in the world is love. I remember reading it when I was younger and loving author Madeline L’Engle’s explanation of space travel. If it’s so hard to fly such great distances, why not just fold the two points of space together in an extra dimension. Then you’ll already be there! It’s like picking up two corners of a flat sheet (thus changing it from a plane to a 3 dimensional object), and placing them together. Brilliant! As a ten-year-old, I couldn’t understand why scientists hadn’t simply done this yet. What were, they? Stupid? God.

A Wrinkle in Time is this Canadian made-for-TV movie that I don’t think anybody saw, but you should check it out. The cast is super likable (it stars Kitty Pryde from X2!), the CG as I remember it is perfectly acceptable, and the story is wonderfully fantastical, not to mention the nostalgia factor.